Saturday, October 22, 2016

Larius Firetongue's School of Sorcery is out!

Cover Art by Eric Lofgren

Six months ago this book was an assembly of notes in Microsoft Word. Even two years ago it was an idea I had; aside from Redhurst Academy of Magic for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, gaming sourcebook dedicated to magic school adventures and settings where rather rare. Sure you had city-based sourcebooks make mention of a mage's college here and there, but they were but one piece of the setting, one page in a much larger tome. Having grown up on Harry Potter and influenced by
school-based Japanese anime and manga, it seemed odd to me that such a popular and ripe subgenre was going more or less unexploited in the D&D and OSR fandoms.

As the largest book I've published yet, it is hard to describe the feelings going through me now that it is fully finished. For the last 3 days I spent 5 to 6 hours on average in Adobe InDesign, motivated by a newfound burst of energy now that I was nearing completion. As soon as I scanned the book for error-checking and made a prototype PDF which by all accounts worked, the tiredness rushed over me suddenly like a tidal wave. But within that exhaustion I felt satisfaction, happiness at a job well done. The happiness one gets at the end of a long and winding road, and as they look back they see that all their hard work led them here.

Thus the creation of this sourcebook. Larius Firetongue's School of Sorcery is a 100-page sourcebook full of new rules and setting material optimized for campaigns where the PCs are apprentices at a magical academy and all the crazy shenanigans which can only occur from spell-slinging adolescents and grimoires full of forbidden knowledge. It was made with Swords & Wizardry in mind, but can be a useful toolbox for other Original and Basic D&D style retroclones. Even if the magic school campaign does not appeal to you, the book is filled with options sure to please any fan of spellcasters from new spells, a cantrip subsystem, turning books into a new form of treasure capable of teaching readers new and interesting abilities, and the like.

It's available for sale on Drive-Thru RPG and RPGNow, and the product contains bookmarks and is watermark-free.

If this sounds interesting to you, or if you know of a gamer friend who would like this, feel free to take a look and share. I hope my work brings as much fun to your gaming table as I did writing it. But this isn't going to be my only magic-school sourcebook! I am hard at work on an adventure path for Pathfinder and 5th Edition, along with some other work projects. As they're still in the idea stage I'm afraid that I can't share much information about them as of now, but hopefully you'll be tided over with this latest offering.

To all my fellow fantasy academia enthusiasts, I wish you good luck and good gaming!